The Listings; HOLIDAY WITH PRESTON STURGES

By DAVE KEHR

Published: December 17, 2004

Preston Sturges's most creative period lasted a mere eight years -- from his 1940 directorial debut, ''The Great McGinty,'' to ''Unfaithfully Yours'' in 1948 -- but that short time was enough to yield perhaps the most profound comic vision of American life ever recorded on celluloid. During the next three weekends the American Museum of the Moving Image will be screening eight classics by Sturges (above), beginning tomorrow at 2 p.m. with ''The Great McGinty,'' an ever more relevant fable of American politics in which an unemployed Chicagoan (Brian Donlevy) is selected as a sham candidate for governor by the local machine. At 4 p.m. tomorrow and 2 p.m. on Sunday, the series will present ''Sullivan's Travels,'' Sturges's most socially engaged film, about a lightweight Hollywood filmmaker (Joel McCrea) who embarks on a tour of underclass America as research for his ambitious new project, ''O Brother, Where Art Thou?'' (a title since appropriated by Joel and Ethan Coen). The series continues on Dec. 26 with Sturges's great romantic comedies, ''The Palm Beach Story'' and ''The Lady Eve'' (repeated on Jan. 1), and concludes on Jan. 2 with the film many critics consider Sturges's masterpiece, ''The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.'' A cheerfully blasphemous takeoff on the Nativity story relocated to the American home front of World War II, it finds a small-town good-time girl (Betty Hutton) mysteriously in a family way after spending a dimly remembered night with a soldier whose name may or may not have been Ignatz Ratskiwatski. (American Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens, (718) 784-0077. Admission: $10; $7.50 for 65+ and students; $5 for children 5 to 18; free for children 4 and younger, members and for everyone on Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m.; Friday-night screenings are extra.) DAVE KEHR